dangerouslyawesome

I write a lot about IndyHall on this blog, but I don’t think I’ve spoken at any great length about another local organization, Philly Startup Leaders. I’ve recently joined the organization as part of a newly formed advisory board, along with a number of other people from various local organizations that support and contribute to the local scene, as well as others who have been long-time fixtures and observe Philadelphias growth from another vantage point.

Philly Startup Leaders, like IndyHall, has modest beginnings: started by a couple of people who had or were involved with startups to discuss the challenges of being a startup in Philadelphia. Those early meetings, all held over beers as far as I’m aware, have transformed into a strong mission for the Philadelphia startup community:

“…above all else, startup entrepreneurs need each other.”

So what’s been fascinating to me has been watching IndyHall and PSL, two different communities grow alongside each other with similar purpose and vision. Lots of crossover has taken place. We share a number of members. Some of us have worked together. All good, healthy things for the ecosystem.

The PSL board has done a great job of growing membership, creating and evolving new events for the membership to participate in, crafting a manifesto, and providing the primary venue for community: the PSL-Talk e-mail list.

That e-mail list, a phenomenal resource for the community, seems to also be one of it’s greatest weaknesses.

There’s currently a flare-up (well, it’s currently as public as the e-mail list is…another issue…and it’s persistent in back-channels) about “self promotion and sales” in the list. When a new thread author, or an existing thread responder, posts something that is less about contributing information to the community and instead, advertises themselves as the solution to a specific problem, they receive a slap on the wrist (public or private, at the board’s discretion). The response is usually something like this one, from PSL co-founder and president Blake Jennelle:

Steve, you could have sent this solicitation to Yasmine directly. Promoting your consulting services is not appropriate over PSL talk. This is your public warning as per the policy you see in the footer. If this happens again you will be removed from the list.

The policy in the footer that Blake refers to reads:

The PSL Talk List is /not a sales channel/.  If you use the PSL Talk List to make a sales pitch to the community, you will be warned, publicly. If you do it again, you will be removed from the list.

I want to be clear and say that I understand why this rule is in place. Lists that are primarily solicitation, job postings, and the like do a lot of harm to the balance of “has” and “needs” of a community.

I liken it to the situation that IndyHall has with recruiters and job-postings. We wanted to make IndyHall a place and a community where people can be more effective at getting their work done. If the ecosystem becomes a place where people can come to get work, vs a place where people come to do work, the has/needs balance gets out of whack.

This is a tricky situation to deal with, for a couple of reasons. First and formost, the LAST thing I want is to be the person, or organization, that gets between a person and the opportunity of their lifetime.

When there’s contact from recruiters, startups, companies, etc about the talent at IndyHall and their availability, we explain that we’re an organization that provides physical space and community resources to our membership, as well as a highly collaborative environment that they can use to get their work done. Work exchanges hands all the time, but we don’t get in the middle of it. If you [recruiter/startup/company/etc] is interested in coming to IndyHall as a member, to use the space and community resources in the same way as anyone else who walks in our door, we welcome you!

So rather than police their intentions, which are to find a candidate for the job they have open, we frame it appropriately. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from walking in the door and joining IndyHall. So long as you can work from anywhere, pay your membership, come on by.

What’s nice is…because the culture is established by the existing membership, most anti-culture behavior sorts itself out. Rather than police culture, which is a very top-down way of looking at things, we carefully frame the situation.

If that person, whoever they are, feels they aren’t getting what they came there for, odds are, they came for the wrong thing. And most importantly, they won’t come back.

So, I came down on Blake’s response in the e-mail list where he slapped the so-called service provider on the wrist for an infraction that I’ll keep referring to as “anti-culture behavior”.

Someone who specializes in the topic of a question responds, and it’s sales. Someone who’s novice (or less experienced) responds, and it’s a-OK. Does anybody else see the problem here? I think there’s a difference between letting the group know what you do (within the list, which is the only unified point of membership of PSL) and overtly selling it to the group. What happens when someone asks about office space, and someone other than me recommends IndyHall? What if that person is a member of IndyHall? Is it better if they aren’t a member of IndyHall? It’s not me selling, but they’re selling for us (without my direct influence). What happens when somebody asks for help, like in this case? Experts aren’t allowed to be responded to in public discourse? What does that accomplish? I know that a LOT of energy goes into keeping this list anti-sales, and don’t think that I don’t understand why. Maybe if that energy went into focusing on what this list is, instead of what it’s not, the message would be clearer to people joining PSL. I don’t think the barrier to entry is to high or too low, I just think that you’ve put up the wrong barrier.

I admittedly painted some broad strokes, for the sake of illustration. But I made my point, and framed in the context of this post, I think it makes even more sense.

So Blake responds:

All Steve had to do was answer Yasmine’s question over the list and let his expertise speak for itself. This would have been a much more effective sales pitch. Alex, when you share your expertise on workspaces, when Wil shares his expertise on SEO, when Aaron shares his expertise on marketing, that unquestionable adds value to the list. It’s when you send a solicitation, beyond giving freely of your expertise, that people get annoyed. PSL talk is about helping each other for the sake of helping each other. That’s the culture that draws so many people to this community, as to Indy Hall. That’s the culture that we care so much about protecting and nurturing. That’s what PSL IS about.

Which, again, I completely agree with. Except this part:

That’s the culture that we care so much about protecting and nurturing.

I think it jumped out at me because I said something very similar in an unrelated conversation with Sean Blanda, co-founder of TechnicallyPhilly just yesterday.

Blake and the PSL board have always taken the approach of policing, posting signage (the footer warning), and warning/banning offenders.

What concerns me about this approach is that I don’t know if you can protect and nurture culture at the same time. By protecting it, you’re not letting it build up its own cultural defenses, which would truly be nurturing it into maturity.

My most recent post to the list encouraged Blake in two directions: first, to take some of the board-only-back-channel-discussion into a public forum, and make the most of the smart problem solvers he has as peers in his community. Second, to focus on what PSL is and stands for, instead of trying to keep out everything that it isn’t. Since, Blake has started a new thread doing just that, in which I’ll be sharing this post, as well as participating in the group discussion as much as is appropriate.

I don’t have the exact solution for PSL. I’m not a genie. And believe me, I’m far from perfect.

But I do know that policing culture is historically ineffective (culture’s going to go where it wants) and if the PSL board and the community it represents put more energy into nurturing than protecting, the solution would likely begin to materialize as a much clearer, and more sustainable approach to the problem.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #4: Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

What this really says is: don’t change your voice just because you think “doing business” requires a different voice than your own.

If you’re one person, you have one voice. Your own.

If you are a company of multiple people, you have a collection of voices. A collection of voices and the motions and patterns that they represent can be called a culture. While harder to measure and certainly harder to control, corporate cultures still represent a voice, and that voice is heard and perceived by your customers.

So regardless of a solo company or a gigantic company, are going to be heard by your customers.

Once your customers get used to that voice (assuming they stick around long enough to do so), don’t lead them into a bait and switch. Maintain consistency. If your voice changes from “how can I help you” to “how can you help me”, you’ve successfully alienated the customers you’ve worked so hard to gain the trust of.

Pro-tip: the human voice is easiest to maintain when it’s not faked in the first place. So don’t fake it. We can tell.

“We’re a community of workers, unified by the fact that we all make a living doing things that we love” – Dave Speers

I consider myself lucky that I really, really enjoy the work that I do. Recently, my passion has been poured into the coworking project, Independents Hall, and being involved in various other community building events. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I had to force myself to return to reality and face the facts…in order to pay the bills, Alex Hillman is a developer.

Coming back from Orlando I faced a pile..one of the most daunting piles of work I’ve ever felt myself under (far worse than any string of exams I felt while still in school). To be fair, the pile was my own fault. I hadn’t done a very good job of ramping things down right before swinging into “IndyHall Mode”, where I spent most of August and September. But, I had committed to clients, who had paid for services, and I was definitely pushing the limits of the relationships I have with my clients.

On the record, THANK YOU, to all of the clients I have that were patient and proud of the stuff we did with IndyHall, and understanding while I got back in the saddle and found my way back into my development routine.

That said…2 weeks of hell, 18+ hour days, juggling stacked and overdue deadlines (again, all my own fault)..and there’s finally some light at the end of the tunnel. If I could bottle the refreshing feeling I had as I started crossing things off my to-do list, and sell it, I would. I’m pretty sure that the government would make it a controlled substance, it because the feeling was that good. Ahem. Anyway.

I realized something. These working conditions I put myself under were taking away from one important part of what I did. I develop, because I love to. I was developing these projects, because I HAD to, and the situation I got myself into was leading me towards a burnout. Understanding that my commitments and promises are what drive business and growth, and my loyal customers could have left weeks ago but instead stuck it out with me, helped. But emotionally…the realization that I wasn’t enjoying myself was a little damaging. I did not want to burn out this quickly at doing something that I enjoy so much.

Then, one week ago today, a screenshot came across my desk from one of the sharpest interface designers I know, Amy Hoy. At the top of that screenshot, I saw this:

My good friend Gary Vaynerchuk, recently soaring into the stratosphere with his 300+ episodes of a wine-tasting video podcast, was staring me in the face from the “laid back friday” couch and pointing at me as if to say, “yo man, this one’s for you”. Amy asked if I knew anyone who could build this out for a wordpress template for Gary’s new side project, and something in me said “you’ve got other stuff to do, but this one will be good for your soul”. So I agreed to spend last Saturday banging out this template.

I’m still not 100% sure what about this project set it apart, and realistically, it was only about 3 hours of work, but it was able to zero me out. I didn’t do it because I had to, I did it because I wanted to. Yesterday, I spent part of my afternoon with Gary and WLTV Producer Erik Kastner, at the Wine Library (holy crap, you have to go the place is nuts) talking about some of the things clunking around in my head. We’ll see what materializes from those conversations, I think it’s some good stuff.

I guess the whole reason I started this post was to stress the need to do things that you love. It’s energizing, and it’s healthy. I remember being in grade school and having assigned reading and pleasure reading. At the time, assigned reading may have been something from a composition book, or a textbook…but either way I read it because I had to. On the other side, I’d pick up something I wanted to read (at the time, I remember R.L. Stein “Goosebumps” series was a popular choice).

The act of reading was the same. Eyes scanning pages for letters forming words forming sentences, paragraphs, pages, and ultimately some story. But the book I picked, I had an emotional gratification from. I think this goes for the work I do, too. The act of building out this page for Gary was no different, but seeing Gary’s site live was a different reaction than I had to any of the other project’s I’ve wrapped in the last few weeks.

So where does this realization leave me? Well, I’m still processing that. I’ve got some exciting new things on the horizon, opportunities and events. I have a dream that is being realized day by day. I have some of the best friends in the world that I’m so happy are around for all of this, and many more friends that I’ve made because of the events of the last several months. I’m glad that I have them to turn to at this point in my life as I’m putting all of the pieces together and figuring out the next move. Big or little, something’s brewing.

The only thing that’s certain is that I’m going to love it.

update: seems gary and i were reading each others thoughts and he did his 120 second video today on a very similar topic, his “big picture patch“. A good reminder to put things into perspective, no matter your situation.

isn’t for the lack of interesting things going on. Quite the contrary, in fact. I have a MILLION things I want to write about. Among them:

• The opening of Independents Hall on 32 Strawberry Street
• The power of building the community before the product or service
• My own discoveries about balance and time management
• Neat new development projects
• A summary of what I’ve learned so far along the path of building IndyHall
• and much more…

In the mean time, to tide you over, you can read this piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer about IndyHall.

Roz made really great post on the urban family, and afterwards followed up with me offline about the format that etsy (an awesome crafty/boutique community) has run that really feels like a direction that IndyHall is headed.

Etsy has another “entity” called EtsyLabs, which allowed them to extend their successful community of people selling their things online into a resource to teach OTHER people how to experience that same success from doing something that they love.

Roz is spot on, part of the fuel for me wanting to start organizing Independents Hall was self-serving: I’d already built a successful business that was based around sharing of talents between friends and established talent partners. Since it worked so well for me, I not only needed a place to find more partners (thats the self-serving part), but also I wanted to show others the value of collaboration, and make it easier for them to be awesome at what they do.

Along the way, many of us have become friends, and encourage each other to succeed and be happy with what we do, even outside of the realm of “work”. The fact of the matter is, Independents Hall has allowed us to build the foundation of an “urban family” that’s much larger than just our circle of friends, acquaintances, and business partners. By taking an online community offline, and doing things face to face and not just for the purpose of business but for the purpose of improving the quality of our lives, we make huge strides to unify an otherwise segmented community that we live in.

[tags]urban family, community, philadelphia, Etsy, EtsyLabs[/tags]

Originally Uploaded by ducttapeavenger

First off, you should know about a blog that was started during BlogPhiladelphia. Literally, in the 30 minutes of me running an open grid session, a blog was created from scratch (domain purchase to live) as a response to Scott McNulty’s “Group Blogging” session. You can keep an eye on it’s evolution at PhillyGeeks.net. The most recent post by Viddler’s Colin Devroe, has elicited the following response from me. It’s sort of to Colin, sort of to myself, and sort of to you, the reader. Some of it requires reading his post first, which I suggest doing. In the end, I’ll likely end up taking it elsewhere, since this is effectively a brain dump.

So I apologize for any confusing direction of a message, or the language used. This is direct from my brain to your screen.

Here goes. [...]

As a developer, even when I’m developing solo, subversion saves me both time and headaches. When working with additional developers…well Dan Cederholm puts it best:

You can work on your own, commit changes, send a message with that change, I’m totally hooked on this way of working on web apps. Yeah, it’s so much fun working on something of your own. You feel more invested and you don’t feel like you’re on the clock so you put more detail, more attention to detail, and you’re just more excited about it. It’s fun. With a lot of the client work I do, because I’m focused on the UI a lot of times I’m handing off what I did to someone else, they’re implementing it, it usually gets messed up, that’s sort of par for the course and it’s rare when it doesn’t. Working on something yourself with somebody else when you’re both in tune with what this product is, it’s so much fun and it’s far superior.

A number of tech people I work with regularly comment on how designers could really benefit from subversion. Bit-wise version control seems so much smarter, from both a size/storage perspective, as well as a team integration perspective, than this_is_the_newest_version_1.0b_final_reallyitsfinaliswear.psd.

Subversion for Design

Of course, in respect to designers, the whole prospect of working from a command line is understandably intimidating. And even with a myriad of GUIs for subversion, when it occasionally gets unruly (which it does…there’s no denying that), you need some command line mojo to get things cleaned back up.

A photoshop plugin would be sweet, something like “save as version” that takes care of all of the legwork. Consider that an official “pretty pretty please someone build that for CS3″

The real story

But that’s not what I’m writing about today. I’m writing about what I always get psyched about, a really cool LOCAL project coming from one of my new friends here in the Philly tech/creative community. I spoke to Chris Nagele of Wildbit the other day at the Cream Cheese Session and he was pimping a new rails app that his team has built, currently going by the mysterious name “Project Alpha”. In short, Project Alpha is hosted subversion. That’s not new, not even close. It also has a built in browser, and tracking, but that itself also isn’t new (though Chris’s implementation is about as sharp as I’ve seen). What’s REALLY smart is direct integration with Fogbugz, Lighthouse, and Basecamp. Essentially, all subversion activity is filtered to the right people on the team, regardless of if they are working directly with the code. This isn’t a code hosting, this is code hosting geared towards team integration and highly productive workflows. I’ve snagged some screenshots from Chris’s post on the Wildbit site, check them out.

The Dashboard

Repository Overview

Changesets

File Browser

There’s clear cues that were taken from some of our favorite team and project management tools, which I love because the way webapps are being built now, once you use one you can be comfortable in many other ones. Features, rather than interfaces, are the defining differences.

Why this works

My business workflow uses a bunch of apps. Why would I pay for multiple hosted apps rather than have one “do-it-all” suite? I think that the current trend of “do one thing really, really well” apps is smart, so long as their data is portable (like Project Alpha takes advantage of), I’m happy to have a dozen “best of breed” apps that talk to each other than one large lumbering suite that sucks at everything. I’m looking at you, Microsoft Office.

Wishes

Not-so-silent wish? I’d love to see a partnership between these tools and the model that’s run at BountySource. BS has it’s own SVN browser, which is not only part of their system bus is an open source rails plugin as well. I really like some of it’s features and Dave and Warren @ BountySource work really hard to promote open source as a viable business model. I could see both of these ventures really benefiting from each others’ work.

Also I’ll push for the integration of OpenID (so I can log into multiple accounts I’m invited into with the same URL based identity, of course), and microformats (i see opportunity for hatom and hcard immediately, I’m sure we can find a couple more things that can be marked up). But I’m sure these are considerations for down the road, because Chris is a smart guy

Testers needed!

Oh, one last thing. Chris is looking to get some testers to work with Project Alpha. Also from his blog post:

We are releasing a private beta soon. When it is ready, it will be launched as a hosted subscription-based service with free and paid accounts. We are thinking about a free single project installable version as well, but have not made up our minds yet. If you are interested in the Private Beta, please email me and provide some details on how you might use the system (size of team, number of repos, etc).

[tags]svn, subversion, hosted app, wildbit, philadelphia, independentshall, chris nagele, Project Alpha, OpenID, microformats[/tags]

I’ve been spending a lot of time going to and organizing meetups as I gather information, resources, and recruits for Independents Hall. I spend a good amount of time meeting people and DOING pitches (I don’t cognizantly pitch anymore…it’s become a bi-product of conversation). What I HAVEN’T done is been able to spend a ton of time listening to other peoples’ ideas and providing ideas and input on them.

This past week I got to participate in my first “Purple Cow Brainstorming Circle”. The Purple Cow, by Seth Godin, inspired the event. Seth is known as a “change agent”, and it makes sense to me that his type of thinking would inspire this type of event. This local group is organized by Mimi Somsanith and Jen Antonio-Lim, both of whom I met a few weeks back at CreativeCamp.

So what is a Purple Cow Brainstorming Circle? We’ll…it goes like this: Each participant gets 3 minutes to pitch an idea. At the end of the pitch they cite 3 things that they need in order to reach the goal of the pitch, as well as 3 skills that they have, as an individual, to offer back to the group. Then there is a 3 minute Q&A session. And on to the next pitch-er. Once everyone has gone, the entire group gets to spend time talking with each other, extending conversations from ideas that came to them during the pitch-sessions. The ideas, which have been written down and posted on the wall by the moderators, also provide a venue for comments from people, and even a place to stick your business card if you want to help the person achieve their idea!

This “Idea-Pitch Open Mic night” allows for a rapid-fire version of what I’ve seen go on at the Barcamps I’ve attended. Ideas fly back and forth, but without a structure…one discussion may get stomped by another, and that original idea may get lost into an abyss of good ideas. This lets everyone get their stuff out, really fast, and save the “good stuff” (some may view it as side conversation or cruft…but thats where the real value in these events is) for last.

At any rate, the event was a TON of fun. I met some cool people who were totally into Independents Hall, and got a chance to hear some other peoples’ good ideas. It’s so great to see that other people are cranking out good ideas here in Philly, and a venue like the PC Brainstorming Circle encourages people to follow through on them.

I may suggest that we try some of the rapid-fire Idea Pitch stuff at Junto next week, depending on who shows up and where the conversation goes. I encourage people to check it out and come visit the next one (I’ll post the date as soon as I know about it), and if you’re not in Philly, try out the format in your city!

Technorati Tags: conference, conversations, Independents Hall, purple cow, seth godin

Its true. You heard it here second, because it was said first (at least today) by John Gruber of Daring Fireball. John is a Philadelphia resident, and if my networking has served me as well as I think it has, he lives (or at least hangs out) fairly close to my ‘hood. He might even frequent the Starbucks that my girlfriend works at.

And yet, despite a couple of fairly innocuous attempts to contact on my part, he hasn’t returned my notes. C’mon John, it’s just a friendly outreach to find out who my neighbors are. I don’t want to be a creepy stalker-type, so its not like I’m gonna start tossing pebbles at windows and wait for you to answer the door. But you’re a public persona, like it or not. You make money from the fact that people like what you say, and how you say it. I’m just one of those people who happens to be your neighbor. WAVES HI

That’s the end of my “John Gruber won’t answer my emails” rant, and on to my real point: John is right. Working from home totally destroys nights and weekends. It’s hard enough, in this industry, to “turn off” at the end of the day. It’s downright impossible when your work is sitting across the room from you, staring you in the face, waiting for you. “I have an idea right now, no, this can’t wait until monday”, you rationalize with yourself. “I know I should be spending time with my wife/girlfriend/kids, but if I just get this idea out right now…”, you tell yourself. But it’s not healthy, at least not socially, to work from home all the time.

So where do people like us (I’m talking about me and John Gruber, a freelance developer and a freelance writer, but the message applies to anyone who’s a freelance creative of some sort) go? We work from Starbucks. Or some other local cafe. We spend $50/week on lattes, over-caffeinating for the sake of a comfy chair that ISN’T in our house. But we don’t get to really interact with the other patrons…why should they care about what I’m working on? And what should I have to do with their coffee break? Nothing. Coffee shop culture is great when it comes to the work-at-home crowd, but it only serves a single functional purpose: get out of the house (ok, two functional purposes, if you count that cup of coffee).

Enter coworking. Coffee shop culture, bohemian creativity, and migrant work-patterns…meet some of the structure and collaboration of an office-like setting. It’s beautiful, really. Not only are you paying for a space at a desk (rather than paying for overpriced coffee with the hopes of having one of the comfy chairs by the window), but you’re paying for exposure, you’re paying for opportunity, you’re paying for networking. You’re paying for utilities that you don’t have in your house (most likely)…I’m talking about conference space with projectors, white boards, and conference phones. You’re paying for some other cool “community” style resources that really benefit the indie community. Maybe group discounted health insurance. Maybe discounted car-share memberships. Maybe premium or early registration for local indie-run events. These are just a touch on the ideas for what kinds of services that could be offered to an organized, but still independent, group of creatives. And, you’re also put in touch with coworkers around the country…and around the world. It’s like being part of a company that has an office anywhere you travel to, but still having the flexibility of being a freelancer.

So, John Gruber…you’re right. Weekends lose a bit of luster when you work at home. So come work at Independents Hall. Get a chance to turn off at the end of the day. Start appreciating your nights and weekends more. Benefit from the resources that we can offer once we have a solid group of members. We’d love to have someone like John Gruber behind our initiative here. We’d love to have someone like John Gruber supporting the idea of organizing Philly independent talent.

I’d love to get an email from John Gruber saying, “thanks for helping me get my weekends back”.

But this isn’t about John Gruber, believe it or not. It’s about you. Are your weekends worth getting back? Drop in to our meetup on Monday at Independence Brew Pub and see what’s up. I’m pretty sure you’ll like what you see.

[tags]John Gruber, Independents Hall, Philadelphia, Philly, Coworking, coffee shop culture, weekends[/tags]

quick announcement: If you’re interested in the future state of the independent community here in Philadelphia (and nearby communities), you should plan to attend our first meetup on Monday March 26th at 6pm at Independence Brew Pub. Details and directions on the Upcoming.org listing. Please RSVP.

Oh, we will also have some representatives from the Jersey Shore who are interested in starting “Coworking at The Shore”. Sweet!

This is all really exciting, I hope you can make it!

[tags]coworking, independence hall, meetup, philadelphia, jersey shore, independence brew pub[/tags]